Recently, avian influenza and new influenza have been at issue, and thus airborne infection has been on the rise. Therefore, measurement of airborne microbes from air has been more significantly handled, and accordingly, a biosensor market has grown by a great deal.
Examples of a typical method of measuring airborne microbes from air include a cultivation method of collecting airborne organism particles of a sample gas on a surface of a solid or a liquid suitable for proliferation, performing cultivation under an environment of appropriate temperature and humidity for a predetermined period, and obtaining the number of collected microbes from the number of colonies exhibited on the surface, and a dyeing method of using a fluorescence microscope after dyeing.
Currently, it is possible to perform a rapid operation by reducing a time of a series of processes required in ATP removing treatment, ATP extraction, and measurement of the quantity of emitted light to about 30 minutes by an ATP bioluminescence detection method using a principle that ATP (adenosine triphosphate) and luciferin/luciferase are reacted to emit light.
FIG. 1 shows a constitution of a typical airborne microbial measurement apparatus.
Referring to FIG. 1, a typical airborne microbial measurement apparatus 1 includes an airborne microbe collection apparatus 2 collecting airborne microbes that are present in air, a cell wall destroying apparatus 3 destroying cell walls of the microbes collected in the airborne microbe collection apparatus 2 to extract DNAs, an electrophoresis apparatus 4 separating the extracted DNAs, a dyeing apparatus 5 dyeing the separated DNAs, and a light emission measurement apparatus measuring the intensity of light emitted from the dyed DNAs.
The airborne microbe collection apparatus 2 or the cell wall destroying apparatus 3 may be constituted so that a voltage is applied to the airborne microbes by using a discharge electrode.
In addition, the electrophoresis apparatus 4 includes a membrane (substrate) coated with an agarose gel, and the DNA having a predetermined polarity may pass through a gel layer and be attached to the membrane having an opposite polarity.
As described above, the typical airborne microbial measurement apparatus 1 has a limitation in that since a plurality of apparatuses are complicatedly constituted to be continuously operated, a measurement method is cumbersome and a measurement time may be delayed.
In addition, there is a disadvantage in that since the membrane (substrate) coated with the agarose gel needs to be replaced after used once, a cost is high and an operation is cumbersome.